WiFi Garage Door Controller | Raspberry Pi Pico W Project

by the end of this project I'm going to control that garage door with this phone and this Pico W is how I'm gonna do it why because garage door remotes are clunky and expensive and this is pretty cool here's how it's gonna work I'll set the Pico W up to host a simple web page with buttons for the door controls up stop and down when I press one of those buttons on my phone the Pico W will tell the garage door motor what to do how's the Pico tell the garage door motor what to do my model of garage door motor has an accessory terminal look there's a connection for up stop and down I expect these are meant to be hardwired to some kind of like custom button panel that mounts to the wall for example on that imaginary switch plate when you push the up button it connects the up terminal to the Ground Terminal and I can simulate that by Bridging the terminals with these side cutters look at that and of course the same thing happens when you bridge the downturn off the ground the door goes down side note you really don't want to be sticking tools or bits of yourself into powered equipment unless you really know what you're doing so for the Pico W to tell the motor what to do we need to make a circuit for the pkw that looks like a switch and for that we'll use some transistors like a button switch that makes a connection between these two pins when I press my finger on the button these transistors close the connection between the so-called drain and Source pins when the Pico W pushes on the gate pin with a high voltage from one of its gpio alright it's time to get building I'll use one of these makerverse Proto boards since it has a footprint that accepts a Pico and conveniently labels all the pins starting with the transistor output circuit I've chosen these two n 7000 n-channel mosfets display the leads and solder them to the board [Music] [Music] connect all the source pins to the common rail you can see the silk screen marking that rail in one line the common rail is unconnected by default and can be connected to ground by Closing one of these jumpers next a resistor is connected between each transistor gate and ground these pull down resistors stabilize the gate voltage should the Pico ever become disconnected if they weren't here the gates would be floating and that could mean spurious triggering of the door motor now it's time to solder the screw terminals a 50 Terminal is soldered near the transistors and tracks are formed with solder Bridges to connect each drain pin to a terminal I thought all this bubbling and popping was the excess flux coming out of the solder but it turns out I was just boiling the blue tack that I was using to hold the terminal in place oops the remaining two terminals are for the power connection luckily my garage door motor also provides 12 volt DC power and I'll use a switch mode DC to DC converter to reduce that to 5 volts which is compatible with the pow the converter is soldered into place with the input and shutdown pins connected together to ensure stable operation ashunky diet goes from the output to the v-cis pin on the Pico this is the preferred way to inject external power the diode means we can still connect to the Pico via USB even while it's receiving external power next solder tracks are made from the input and ground pins to the remaining terminals [Music] [Music] the ground is also connected with the Common Ground rail we saw earlier and here I reused a cutoff lead from the diode the output circuit and power supply are complete and it's time to mount the picow I could solder the picot directly to the Proto board it has like castellated pads so it can be mounted directly but to be safe I'll make it removable by using these 20 pin male female headers [Music] foreign [Music] I almost forgot but you do actually have to connect the transistor gates to a control signal and for these I picked gpio 17 18 and 20. time for a smoke test I programmed the onboard led to Blink continuously and connected the circuit to a lab supplier with current limiting as I dialed up the current the circuit kicked in and since the LED continues to flash we know that the Pico is running the code that's on it and the circuit is sitting happy at about a quarter watt next I tested the output circuit a test script activates each transistor in sequence one by one and using the continuity function of a multimeter I can probe each channel to see if it gets pulled to ground when it ought to and importantly there's no shorts between channels either with the hardware proven it's time to set up the firmware the code is adapted from another tutorial where we create a web server to control an LED of course links in the project writer here's how the firmware works we power up the circuit it connects to Wi-Fi and gives us its local IP address we navigate to that IP address and get served a web page which was defined as a bunch of HTML in micropython code when we click on a button it sets that command in the address our code is looking for these commands in the serve client function you can see door equals up door equals down door equals stuff if it finds one it calls the control door function and the control door function checks the command for example up down stop and sets the appropriate pin high that turns on the transistor which pulls the terminal low and drives the door it also blinks the LED briefly and then sets the control pin low again and just like that we're ready to install de-power the dual motor and use some multi-core cable to connect our circuit to the accessory Port we've got 12 volt ground and three control channels fiber wires [Music] got my helper hey Winston you helping yeah yeah oh and now for the moment of truth I navigate to the IP address of the Pico with my phone the web page loads up and the buttons work exactly as expected and stop go up stop throw it down I'm so pleased with how this project feels it feels completely instant when I touch that button on my phone it's actually more responsive than my real physical garage door remotes which often have like a gummy I'm unresponsive button that's a perfectly functional garage door controller that you can access from your phone there's a few nice extras that you could do like assign a static IP address to the Pico W so it its address doesn't change on you and you lose it within your network or can't remember the IP address since I run a pie hole which is like a Raspberry Pi based DNS server I actually redirect all traffic for the domain garage dot door to the IP address of my Pica so I can open up my phone and just go to garage Dot Door and save that as a bookmark I think that's a cute touch it's currently the next day from filming so excuse the rain there's just something that I've got to get off my chest though there are a few things that you should consider before attempting this project the first is safety garage doors are machines that move up and down now they have their own Force sensitive safety mechanisms that are designed by professionals so I consider this to be relatively safe if the Picker W triggers the door to move at some random time I feel like that's probably equivalent to if you had the garage door remote in your pocket and you just butt dialed the garage door and made it move the second is security you are essentially giving everyone on your Wi-Fi network physical access to your garage or house and the last is you could potentially damage your garage door motor or controller you know this is a pretty low-cost project but it could very quickly get very expensive if you damage or break your garage door motor for whatever reason my garage door motor works in the way that we've seen in this video but yours very well could be different so be aware of that consider your personal knowledge electronics and project skills and appetite for risk I would only proceed if you have at least two of those three if you'd like to follow along of course the schematic code bill of materials it's all listed up in the article write-up be sure to check out the precursor tutorial to this project also linked in the write-up in that we cover how to set up a web server that controls an LED and we look at the web server code in a bit more depth until next time happy making [Music]

Channel: Core Electronics

Views: 21,830

Keywords: raspberry pi pico w, raspberry pi pico w project, how to use wifi with raspberry pi pico w, wifi control

Id: bIBQKl_Sots

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2022